Generally speaking, auto-incrementing primary keys are challenging to deal with and can cause headaches long term.
What's generally most important is ensuring primary keys are unique and using UUID strings is ideally suited for that.
class Discount: Object {
@objc dynamic var discount_id = UUID().uuidString
override static func primaryKey() -> String? {
return "discount_id"
}
}
There may be concern about ordering and often times that managed by either adding a class var to determine ordering; like a timestamp for example or if you want to preserve ordering, objects can be added to a List, which keeps the order, like an array.
To answer your specific question, the code in your question is not complete (it was partially pulled from another question). The reason is that for each object that's created, it must be written to realm first, then the next object's primary key is based on the prior object.
Here's an example.
@objcMembers class User: Object {
dynamic var uid: Int = 0
dynamic var username: String?
func getNextUid() -> Int {
let realm = try! Realm()
if let lastObject = realm.objects(User.self).sorted(byKeyPath: "uid").first {
let lastUid = lastObject.uid
let nextUid = lastUid + 1
return nextUid
}
return 1
}
override static func primaryKey() -> String? {
return "uid"
}
}
now the sequence to use this is as follows
let u0 = User()
u0.uid = u0.getNextUid()
u0.username = "User 0"
let realm = try! Realm()
try! realm.write {
realm.add(u0)
}
let u1 = User()
u1.uid = u1.getNextUid()
u1.username = "User 1"
try! realm.write {
realm.add(u1)
}
as you can see, each object needs to be written to realm in order to the next object to be queried to get the prior objects primary key.
It's a whole lot of potentially unnecessary work and code.
My advice: Stick with the UUID().uuidString for primary keys.